Do I have a bad motherboard?

[archcommus]

Today I was opening up Steam and the system locked up. The hard drive light came on steady and I had to reboot. After restarting BIOS could not detect either the hard drive or DVD drive. After messing with the cables some it eventually detected both again, but Windows would not boot. Whether I chose Safe Mode, Last known good configuration, or Normal mode, it would just freeze before even seeing a loading screen. When I tried a repair installation of Windows, it froze around 34 minutes left of the setup process. I ran SeaTools for DOS and Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test on the drive (Seagate 7200.7) and both passed with no errors (the full/advanced test). MemTest ran for awhile with no errors as well. The only thing I can think of at this point is a bad motherboard, unless my hard drive is bad and these diagnostic programs are wrong. Are there any other tests I can try to verify this? Any help is appreciated!

Thanks.

 

[archcommus]

Bump...

 

[Slugbait]

Since it was partially working after "messing" with the cables, the first test is to drop in brand new cables (i've had one or two go bad on me...).

I assume since both seemed to disappear at the same time that the hard drive and DVD are connected to the same ribbon...better idea is to switch the jumper on the DVD to Master or CS and hook it to its own ribbon on the second IDE channel. Reason one is to validate that it's not one of the drives. Second reason is that you will get better performance, especially for things such as ripping.

 

[archcommus]

Thanks. Actually, the two devices are already on different channels, which is what makes it so weird how neither were detected and which led me to suspect motherboard problems. This morning, I tried a fresh install of Windows after a format and it actually worked. So, I grabbed the Vista disc I had laying around and figured I might as well install that and it worked, too. So right now I'm on a fresh Vista install. So it seems my XP install just got hosed after the computer froze. In retrospect maybe I could've fixed it with fixmbr and/or chkdsk, but that wouldn't really explain why it froze part way through the repair reinstallation, when a fresh installation worked. In the end, the real issue here is what made it lock up in the first place.